Where Ontario's tenders actually live

If you build for Ontario municipalities, you already know the annoying part: there is no single place to look. What nobody had, until we went and counted, is the actual map — which municipalities publish where, and how many of them you can reach without an account.

So we checked all 444 of them, one at a time, on 2026-07-31. Here is what is actually out there.

That is 10.4% of municipalities, covering 170,279 residents — under 0.75% of Ontario’s population. Everything else sits behind a platform, behind a form, or behind nothing we could find.

The full distribution

Two things in that table are worth sitting with.

Most of the population is behind one vendor

161 municipalities — 36.3% of them, but 51% of Ontario’s population — publish through bids&tenders. Add 32 on Biddingo and you have the majority of the province’s procurement by population running through two commercial platforms.

That is not a scandal; those platforms do real work and municipalities buy them for good reasons. But it has a consequence people underrate: the concentration is by population, not by municipality count. The big cities are the ones behind the platforms. If you only bid where documents are freely posted, you are working the 0.75% of Ontario that lives in small municipalities.

Seventy-four municipalities had no procurement page we could find

74 municipalities — 16.7%, covering 5,613,053 residents — had no procurement page we could locate from their own homepage. A further 39 could not be read at all, including some large ones whose sites blocked our crawler outright.

We report those two categories separately and deliberately. “We could not find it” and “it does not exist” are different claims, and only the first one is ours to make. A municipality in the “could not be read” bucket may publish perfectly well to a human with a browser.

The middle category is the one that costs you time

79 municipalities post notices on their own site but gate the documents — you can see that a tender exists, but not what it requires, without registering. From a contractor’s point of view this is the worst of both worlds: enough information to make you register, not enough to tell you whether registering was worth it.

What this means for how you bid

• Coverage is a platform question, not a diligence question. No amount of checking municipal websites gets you the 54.4% of the population behind the two big platforms. That needs accounts.
• The open tail is real work. Forty-six municipalities publishing openly is not nothing — it is a genuine, checkable list, and most contractors have never seen it as a list.
• Absence of a notice is not absence of a tender. With 113 municipalities in the two “we could not see it” buckets, a quiet municipality tells you nothing.

The full census is browsable, municipality by municipality, on the census page — including the classification we assigned each one and the page we assigned it from. If we got yours wrong, that page shows you exactly what we saw.

We publish the underlying data because the interesting fact here is not our number. It is that this number did not exist before, for a market that spends billions of public dollars a year.